All posts tagged Ed Balls

The Chancellor is a fan of the policy announcement delivered shortly after dawn. That way he can avoid offending various newspapers, by not having to single out one of the small number of rival key political hacks who might be eager for lollipops the evening before. Instead he prefers to drop such announcements into Radio 4′s Today programme or another breakfast show. That means he meets the “shaving mirror or make-up test” of media management. Rule number one: Best catch your opponent out and announce something on the radio or breakfast TV when they are shaving or applying their make-up. That way you cause maximum confusion as your enemy tries to listen to the detail, whilst hurriedly finishing shaving or applying mascara over the sound of children making a racket and his or special advisor ringing non-stop on the mobile phone to ask “boss, how should we respond?”.

The art of surprise can sometimes work for Osborne. It seems to have done so on Tuesday morning, when his sudden announcement of an £800m extension of the bank levy in political terms changed the lead news story on the day when he was first due to face Ed Balls as shadow chancellor in the Commons. Presumably Balls was ready to paint Osborne in that encounter as insufficiently tough on bank bonuses. Cleverly, ahead of that the Chancellor obscured the bonus issue with another tax raid on the institutions themselves.

Osborne loves playing the game of politics. And there must be a real delight in now having most of the cards, just like Brown and Balls used to, and being able, as they did, to play them at the moment of maximum advantage.

This blog is on holiday this week, so posting is light to non-existent. Apart from on the first clash in the Commons between Chancellor George Osborne and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, which I wouldn’t miss for the world. And for PMQs, where I’m keen to see if David Cameron wears exactly the same shirt, tie and suit identical combo that he now wears for (almost) every public event or media appearance. And for anything else of note.

I have been wondering where the Ed Balls press release on today’s very strong U.K. manufacturing figures had got to. The shadow chancellor is a media dynamo when the economic news is bad, a tenacious terrier on the tail of ministers.

You have to look quite carefully for the reference to the upbeat manufacturing figures. For several paragraphs he lauds his old Harvard tutor Larry Summers, in Britain this week and warning the coalition to hold back on cuts.

But there, buried in the middle of paragraph five, the shadow chancellor welcomes the manufacturing news that contrasts with last week’s dreadful fourth-quarter GDP figures.

“In amongst the bad news this afternoon of 2,400 job losses as the Pfizer research & development facility in Kent closes and mortgage lending hitting a record low, it was good to see that manufacturing is strengthening – on the back of the depreciation of sterling we have seen over the past few years. Manufacturing is a key part of our economy and its needs support in order to fuel future jobs growth. But the government needs to explain why they are cutting Labour’s investment allowances for manufacturers by £75,000 and using the money to give a corporation tax cut which will overwhelmingly benefit the banks.”

“The Purchasing Managers’ Index for the manufacturing sector, a gauge of activity based on a survey of some 600 firms, rose to 62 in January from an increased estimate of 58.7 in December, the highest level since the survey began in 1992.”

This contrasts with the poor GDP figures for the fourth quarter of 2010 (down 0.5%) and suggests that the economy — aided by that long fall of the pound — might be in the process of rebalancing, with export-friendly manufacturing on the up. The pound surged about three-quarters of a U.S. cent on the news.

Clint Eastwood laid down the law on film-making, on crime (he disapproves) and on flat taxes (he approves) in Michael Judge’s excellent interview for The Wall Street Journal. But it was the passage at the end that caught my eye.

Eastwood recounted his experiences as a youngster during the “Not So Great Depression”, that era of joblessness and despair which Gordon Brown’s supporters (Ed Balls, Paul Krugman, David Blanchflower) say he saved the world from repeating. One of the lessons Eastwood seems to have drawn from the 1930s was that its best to assume that a rainy day may come and to save for it. He applied this thinking when he became mayor of his home town.

“When I was mayor here in Carmel we always had a reserve and we never spent more than we took in… That’s the first thing you’re taught when you’re a kid from the Not So Great Depression – don’t spend it all in one place.”

Ed Balls draws the opposite lesson from the Not So Great Depression. His comments in interviews at the weekend, and the historical record, suggest he favors a very different approach: spend it all and then borrow some more.

The Daily Telegraph’s letters page is a repository of wit and invaluable insights. Today one contributor had the perfect solution for those who want to go to the opera only to people watch and be seen in glamorous locations such as the bar at Covent Garden. But what to do if you just cannot stomach sitting through the opera itself? Writes Michael Mander of London NW3:

“You buy two tickets for Covent Garden but don’t turn up there until about 20 minutes before the interval. You go straight to the Crush Room, where you seat yourselves at the best table and order two bottles of champagne. You have finished the first one when the audience come in for the interval and see you there, smiling and waving to all and sundry and reveling in the thinly disguised looks of envy – “How on earth did they get that table?” With the second bottle finished, you take your seats, where you fall asleep, thus avoiding the incredible boredom of what is happening on stage. You wake at the best moment – the curtain calls – when you leap to your feet, applauding ecstatically in the knowledge that it is all over and that you are just about to pop off around the corner to have a suitably fine dinner to round off another perfect night at the opera.”

But alongside Mr. Mander’s opera tips is a very important observation about Ed Balls. Ian Walker, of Earls Colne, Essex, has noticed that when he is on camera the shadow chancellor finds it difficult to stop smiling, even when amusement is highly inappropriate.

Mr. Walker says: “Having cringed repeatedly at Gordon Brown’s inability to smile convincingly, I find that Ed Balls has the opposite affliction – a face which smiles permanently even when talking about sad or serious events.”

Indeed. When Balls was interviewed by Sky News last week about the resignation of Alan Johnson he looked as though he had just been told a very good joke, even though the words coming out of his mouth suggested that he thought Johnson’s departure mildly regrettable. Today he had to battle like mad not to smile when discussing the dreadful GDP numbers and George Osborne’s distress. He made it most of the way through his sound bite for the BBC 6pm news looking somber, but towards the end of the clip it was possible to detect him straining to avoid a big grin.

What should Balls do about this? Here are some top tips for him on keeping a straight face in front of the camera.

1) Ed, try focusing on the thought of an image you find distressing or annoying. Say, David and Samantha Cameron on the steps of Number 10. Or Alistair Darling in the Treasury for almost three years.

2) Don’t, whatever you do, let into your head the words “David Miliband” or the thought of him losing the Labour leadership contest. Bound to make you smirk.

3) Think of what Yvette will say to you if you let the Tories win the next election. That should make you concentrate.

Ed Balls has been winning the war of the sound bites on GDP shrinkage with George Osborne so far today. The Chancellor blaming the snow has cleared the way for his opponents to make mocking remarks about “the wrong kind of snow” (the excuse rail companies in Britain commonly use for weather-related muppetry and disruptions to service).

The shadow chancellor’s interventions on the subject have been cleverly-crafted and sharp. He backed away from predicting a double-dip recession (which would have left him exposed if it didn’t happen). Instead he focused on urging Osborne to get a “Plan B” as a matter of urgency to boost growth.

And then up popped Gordon Brown at lunchtime. Did Balls really want Gordon to choose Ed’s first big day in his new job to re-enter the debate about the economy? Is it helpful to the opposition to have Brown out front again on this stuff? One suspects the answer is ‘no’ on both counts.

Discussing the appointment of the new shadow chancellor with a senior member of the government, I noted that Ed Balls is a formidable media and parliamentary operator. He will liven things up a lot. Might George Osborne have found it much easier to handle Alan Johnson than he will Ed Balls? “Quite,” he responded. “Balls is a killing machine.”

Perhaps that’s a bit strong, but I know what he means. That revving sound you can hear in the distance is Balls getting ready for the publication of the U.K.’s fourth-quarter growth figures on Tuesday. The impact of dreadful weather and higher prices meant that December’s retail sales flat-lined. Economists fear that growth will slow from the third quarter’s 0.7% to just slightly above zero or even worse be flat in the fourth quarter. We’ll see.

If the figures are better than feared, expect Balls to disappear for the day. But if they show any substantial dip prepare for him to unleash hell round-the-clock on Osborne and the government, claiming that this proves public spending cuts are driving Britain back towards recession.

Balls is expert at preparing attack lines that are crystal clear and maintaining message discipline. Together, he and Gordon Brown built the British end of an orthodoxy that dominated for more than a decade. It is easy to laugh now at the idea of “the end of boom and bust”, and see it after the event as another historical example of hubris. But all sorts of people—investors, bankers, Tony Blair, eventually the Tory opposition under Cameron and Osborne and a great many commentators—went along with it, accepting its underlying assumptions or at least feeling they couldn’t challenge them in public.

It is one evening this week and Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper are relaxing at home reading biographies of Beatrice Webb and Stalin. The doorbell rings and Yvette goes to answer it.

Mili E: “Good evening, Yvette. Is Ed in?

Yvette (turning round and shouting up the stairs): “Ed, are you in?”

Ed Balls (distantly): “Who is it?”

Yvette (smiling sarcastically): “It’s the leader…”

Ed Balls (words coated in sarcasm): “Well if it’s the leader I must come down at once.”

Ten minutes later and Mili E is still standing on the doorstep. Ed Balls saunters down the stairs clutching a copy of “A User’s Guide to Tyranny: Stalin’s Greatest Purges.” Smirking, and blinking, he makes a bow.

Wow. It’s a Balls-Cooper family takeover of Labour. Alan Johnson has resigned for “personal reasons” and Ed B will take the shadow chancellor post. Yvette Cooper becomes shadow home secretary (taking the post recently held by her husband). Douglas Alexander becomes shadow foreign secretary.

More later after Mili E’s statement and reaction to it. A very difficult moment for Ed and for DUEMA (the Don’t Underestimate Ed Miliband Association, the struggling organization of which I was one of the few founding members). The Balls-Cooper axis now has him in a vice.

But one of the most extraordinary aspects of Johnson’s story is that he is one of the very few people to be presented with the stick-on opportunity to become prime minister who decided that he didn’t want it. British politics is chock-full of MPs in both major parties who want that job, but circumstances, mistakes, misfortune and sometimes downright muppetry, mean they never even get close to a hint of a chance.

In contrast, it was Alan Johnson’s for the taking. What a thought for a top politician to carry around in his head.